PACIFIST PENS BOGUS ENCYCLICAL ON NUCLEAR ARMS

An American pacifist said Wednesday that his interest in banning nuclear weapons prompted him to forge a letter from the Pope declaring it a sin for Catholics to help build or deploy nuclear arms.

Catholic officials said the fraudulent papal draft to bishops has been circulated recently in the U.S. and Europe.

Entitled ''The Resurrection of Peace,'' the letter declared it sinful for Catholics to build or deploy nuclear arms.

Its author, Thomas Siemer, came forward this week, saying he distributed the tract to ''create an interest in a delayed and much-needed encyclical clearly banning nuclear weapons.''

Siemer, about 57, drew public attention in November, 1983, when he fell off a police barricade in St. Peter`s Square while trying to hand an antinuclear message to Pope John Paul II.

The father of seven, who worked at a nuclear arms plant before becoming involved in the peace movement, also staged a hunger strike for peace in 1982. In his statement, Siemer said he had ''sinned by building first-strike nuclear weapons for 23 years,'' as well as by drafting what he described as a ''proposed encyclical.''

Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro Valls this week dismissed the bogus document. ''From time to time something like that appears, and we don`t pay any attention,'' he said.

But the papal pro nuncio to Washington, Archbishop Pio Laghi, recently mailed warnings to all U.S. bishops after some of them received copies of the counterfeit missive, U.S. church sources said.

Much of the text was lifted from published statements by the Pope and other church and scriptural sources. But its conclusion went far beyond the papal record on nuclear arms.